Peter Weir awarded Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award

Peter Weir was awarded the prize – the Biennale’s highest honour – at a gala ceremony at Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema in Lido.

Peter Weir poses with his Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award in Venice on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Aspiring filmmakers should embrace loneliness and “unplug” from the world, Australian filmmaker Peter Weir said as he ­accepted the prestigious lifetime achievement Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.

“(If I were starting out) today, I would say even don’t pick a camera up. I would pick up a pencil and paper,” he told Reuters after being presented the prestigious gong by Venice Film Festival ­director Alberto Barbera.

“I would practise like (I was in) a gymnasium, exercising the mental muscles. (Filmmaking) is a lonely road. It should be lonely. You have to travel alone.”

Weir was awarded the Biennale’s highest honour at a gala ceremony at Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema in Lido.

Said Barbera of the Australian director’s career: “With a total of only 13 movies directed over the course of 40 years, Peter Weir has secured a place in the firmament of the great directors of modern cinema.

“In his films, Weir combines reflections on personal themes and a need to reach as vast an audience as possible. Despite the diversity of the topics he addresses, it is not difficult to discover a constant in his daring, rigorous, and spectacular film opus.”

The announcement marks the third Golden Lion this year for an Australian at the Biennale.

Scottish and Indigenous artist Archie Moore’s large-scale installation kith and kin – which charts in chalk multiple generations of the artist’s lineage around a water-encircled table featuring paper documenting Indigenous deaths in custody – was in April announced as the Golden Lion ­recipient for best pavilion in the Giardini, the sprawling outdoor space featuring entrants from 88 different countries.

Weir with his award. Picture: Getty Images

In July, Geelong-based company Back to Back Theatre – a company for disabled and neurodivergent performers – also was announced as a lifetime achievement Golden Lion winner.

The Venice Biennale, a seven-month-long art jamboree held every two years in the floating city, is widely recognised as the most prestigious cultural event in the world.

Weir, 80, is one of Hollywood’s biggest names. His international breakthrough was the 1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock which gained cult status and opened the door to Hollywood which led him to direct classics such as Gallipoli, (1982), Witness (1986), Dead Poets Society (1990) and The Truman Show (1999).

In 2022, Weir was awarded an honorary Oscar, and he has been nominated for six Oscars over his career, with directing nominations for Witness, Dead Poets ­Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Weir confirmed earlier this year that he would be retiring from directing after a long career.

In an interview at the Festival de la Cinematheque in Paris, where he was a guest of honour, Weir stated: “Why did I stop ­cinema? Because, quite simply, I have no more energy.”